Reading Women Challenge

We've been fans of reading challenges for a while now and are quite excited to get to host our own. Reading challenges are a great way to read outside your comfort zone—and you get to do it with other bookish friends!It officially begins January 1st, 2019 and ends December 31st, 2019.

Here’s the rundown: complete as many challenges as you can from the list below. If you have one book that covers two categories, feel free to count it for both. It's not a contest. Our goal is to encourage you to read widely (and fight the patriarchy, but that was probably a given), so just have fun with it! To help cheer you on, we’ll be hosting mini giveaways along the way. Be sure to share your progress, use the hashtag #ReadingWomenChallenge.

While it includes middle readers, this prompt does NOT include young adult (YA) literature. There is a separate prompt for that.

A multigenerational family saga

A book featuring a woman in science

A play

A novella

A novella is a text of written, fictional, narrative prose normally longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, somewhere between 17,500 and 40,000 words.

A book about a woman athlete

A book featuring a religion other than your own

If you have no religion, then choose to read about whatever religion you like!

Note: The spirit of this challenge is to read books with a positive representation of a religion other than your own, so we discourage picking up a book about cults or extremist sects of larger religions for this challenge.

While the translation can be published after 1945, the original text must have been published before 1945.

A book written by a South Asian author

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), a contiguous block of countries, started in 1985 with seven countries—Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka—and added Afghanistan as an eighth member in 2007.

This includes Native, First Nations, and Indigenous women from anywhere in the world.

A book from the 2018 Reading Women Award shortlist

2018 RWA Fiction Shortlist

2018 RWA Nonfiction Shortlist

A romance or love story

A book about nature

A historical fiction book

A book you bought or borrowed in 2019

A book you picked up because of the cover

Any book from a series

A young adult book by a woman of color

We define young adult as book targeted toward readers ages 12 - 18.

BONUS:

A book by Jesmyn Ward

A book by Jhumpa Lahiri

Other Resources

Reading Women Podcast Episode Show Notes - Search the show notes of our past episodes (here's a secret, most of the categories are a variation on last year's episodes). They're organized by theme, so it should be pretty easy to zero in on the category you're looking to fill.